Awareness raising campaigns about responsible water consumption in Northern Italy

It is widely documented that humanity is now consuming more resources than our planet is able to produce and regenerate. Interventions are needed not only to inform and raise awareness about the environmental consequences of our consumption behavior but to generate concrete actions that will result in more sustainable living and consumption styles. Awareness raising campaigns are widely diffused as sustainability actions worldwide. Nevertheless their 15 tangible outcomes in terms of environmental benefits from behavior changes it could be difficult to be assessed. In this research, we present the case study of a project aimed at improving sustainable consumption of water among the citizens of one of the biggest municipality nearby Milan (Sesto San 19 Giovanni), Northern Italy. The goals of the present study were to: i) define the context of water quality and use in Italy; ii) scrutinize the behavior and perception of two different groups of citizens in the context of a case study at local scale; iii) identify the main gaps between factual information on water (quality of water, quantity used) against declared behavior- Although the results of water quality demonstrated that local tap water is potable and perfectly suitable for being use for drinking and cooking, the analysis of the questionnaires showed that most of the citizens still think that bottled water is better than their tap water.